The All Progressives Congress (APC) national chairman, Chief John Odigie-Oyegun, has labelled the rerun polls in Rivers state as a ‘disgrace’.
He made his position known during a chat with journalists after the party’s National Executive Committee (NEC) meeting held at APC’s National Secretariat in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital on March 24.
On Rivers rerun election, he said: “O Rivers, Rivers. It is a disgrace. That is the only thing one can say. Some of the things that happened and some of the killings that happened would never have been able to happen in this country. But the assurance we can give you and the assurance Mr President has given us is that these issues will be vigorously addressed.
“People must not get away with that level of dastardly act and killings of the most bestial act and in no circumstance must behaviour like be allowed to spread to the rest of the country because unless you address it, you are infact inviting other states to set up their own military wing,” he stated.
He noted that at the NEC meeting, the party went through all its experiences since the last elections.
“We have taken decisions as to where our strengths were, where we did not quite measure up and all these are going to be addressed.”
“For the first time, NEC has established a budget for the party and we have set up a committee to look once more into the constitution of the party to be able to streamline it. More particularly, NEC decided to downsize our Board of Trustees in line with all other constitutional amendment.”
“We don’t have any particular number, but it is going to be seriously downsized. The committee will be headed be the National Legal Adviser. We will put our head together on that in the next day or two and there may be need to hold on a little bit.
On finding a replacement for Lai Mohammed, the former national publicity secretary of the party who was appointed Minister of Information and Culture by President Muhammadu Buhari, he said: “These are constitutional matters. The zone has to now propose a replacement. It is part of the decisions of today that we are going to have congresses all over the nation to fill all vacancies at all levels of the party which resulted from victory at the election by party officials who decided to contest, appointments at federal level and at state levels.
“There are a lot of vacancies and we need congresses because that is what the constitution provides. No day has been fixed for the congresses because we just took the decision today and we are going to work on it,” he said.
